Paul Ryan Is Not a Complete Hypocrite

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Paul Ryan cultivated an image that was false in some major ways. He pretended to be a budget hawk but consistently supported tax cuts that increased the deficit. He pretended to care about poverty but opposed many policies that had a record of reducing poverty. (Paul Krugman has long written about this hypocrisy, and Matthew Yglesias has a new piece on it in Vox.)

But I don’t agree with the notion that Ryan is a complete hypocrite. He’s long displayed one admirable trait: A strain of honesty. He has acknowledged his desire to shrink popular programs like Medicare and Social Security.

Many other Republicans refuse to admit as much. They claim that the government can cut taxes deeply for the rich and that Medicare and Social Security can somehow magically remain exactly as they are. You saw Republicans in Congress and Trump administration officials make precisely this case last year, during the rush to pass a tax cut.

Ryan, by contrast, proposed radical cuts to Medicare, in his various budget blueprints over the years. He proposed the privatization of Social Security. And, in December, even before Congress passed the tax bill, Ryan said that changes to Medicare and Social Security would be his top priority in 2018. He wasn’t afraid of talking simultaneously about tax cuts and spending cuts — and allowing voters to draw a connection between the two.

These acknowledgments allowed a more honest debate about tax policy than many other Republicans wanted. But an honest debate is a better one. The reality is that today’s Republican Party supports both big tax cuts for the wealthy and the unavoidable counterpart — cuts to health care, retirement and other programs for the middle class and poor.

Ryan wasn’t honest enough to phrase it like that. And he, like many of his colleagues, made a lot of wild claims about the economic growth that would supposedly be unleashed by tax cuts. (He and I debated that topic several years ago.) So I don’t mean to suggest that he was a truth-teller, and I don’t mean to excuse, in any way, his meek response to Donald Trump’s racism and lawlessness. But Ryan is just a bit more complicated than his critics sometimes suggest.

Related: “The critics who flay Ryan as a coward have never understood that his actions are a form of idealism,” Jonathan Chait writes in New York magazine. “To Ryan, the greatest danger to liberty lies not in a president who defies the rule of law but in high tax rates and a functioning social safety net.”

Ryan’s retirement from Congress creates another district that Democrats can plausibly win in November, The Cook Political Report notes. “For Democrats, it will be further encouragement to add to the record number of candidates and to get on board for a Democratic sweep,” argues The Washington Post’s Jennifer Rubin.

On the “FiveThirtyEight Politics” podcast, Julia Azari, a Marquette University political scientist, pointed out that Ryan’s rise and demise had their roots in the same force: the ideological extremity of today’s Republican Party. The schism in the House between the establishment and the far right made Ryan the speaker, because he was the only candidate acceptable to both factions. But the power of the far right has also made the job hard — and helped an extremist like Trump win the presidency, which in turn has the Republicans facing the likelihood of big midterm losses.